Life, Liberty and Ivanka

Artists putting the finishing touches in place on a wax figure of President Trump at Madame Tussauds London in January.CreditChris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States of America, President Trump hosted a lavish party at the Mar-a-Lago White House. Banners proclaiming “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of the Deal” — the catchy slogan chosen for the yearlong celebration — hung at every corner of the sprawling gold-bedecked property.

The Northern White House, as it was now known, had been converted a year earlier into a Washington museum. School groups filed in to gaze dutifully at portraits of the men who had led the country through its first two and a half centuries. For a fee the whole spread could be rented out for wedding celebrations, bar mitzvahs and the like. The Oval Office was said to be a great place to tie the knot.

President Ivanka Trump (“Keep America Greater Than Ever!”) had been elected in a landslide in 2024 after her father’s two-term presidency. She cut a glittering figure at the Florida festivities. Throughout 2026 she had earned praise for resisting family pressure to “modernize” the Declaration of Independence. To substitute “the pursuit of the deal” for the “pursuit of happiness” as one of the “unalienable rights” would, she suggested, “perhaps not be that great of an idea.”

Her father was irked — he had also wanted to sub the bit about all men being created equal — and went into a sulk. But then he had become particularly irritable since stepping down. The Trump Library had flopped; he could think of only one book to put in it. His weight had ballooned. He was still kvetching about Obamacare, and bad hombres, and the fact that despite his best efforts he had been unable to start World War III. President Ivanka Trump tried to console him, but of course she was busy.

Although her presidential style was more prudent than her dad’s, and her knowledge of geography superior, she had come under fire over a couple of issues. The first was her insistence that several rooms near the exit from the Northern White House be converted into showrooms for her fashion brands with displays of Ivanka Trump footwear, handbags, apparel, lingerie and other accouterments.

Her lawyers argued that, as president, she was exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws. This prompted many Americans to ask what a “conflict of interest” was. A Trump decade had changed the country. Departments of ethics had disappeared from American colleges. They were deemed outdated. Talk of “American values” was met with guffaws inside the Mar-a-Lago Beltway. What on earth were American values?

The other awkward issue was President Trump’s decision to name her husband, Jared Kushner, as Special Envoy for the Resolution and Eradication of all Global and Domestic Problems, a new position. Some cynics thought the title a touch inflated, even for cool-hand Jared. The cynics were soon put in their place by the hawks of Trumpelson News Inc., the all-devouring media group started in 2022 with a $38 billion bequest from Sheldon Adelson. Only losers would think Jared Kushner could fail at anything.

World leaders flocked to the all-night party. The rulers of Panama, Qatar, the Philippines, China, Brazil, Kuwait, Egypt and other close American allies were all seated at President Ivanka Trump’s table. The fact that by 2026 she had developed extensive business interests in all those countries was pointed out by a couple of obstinate old newspapers but generally dismissed as irrelevant.

NATO had long since disappeared, replaced in 2022 by the American-led Autocratic Solidarity Organization League (A.S.O.L.), whose core members were the United States, Russia, China, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and France.

The A.S.O.L. leaders were a familiar bunch. President Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China had both extended their mandates indefinitely. So, too, had President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. As President Marine Le Pen of France approached the end of her second term there was widespread speculation that she, too, would scrap term limits. Any self-respecting A.S.O.L. leader would do no less! A recent addition to the treaty organization was President Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who had agreed to freeze his country’s nuclear program in exchange for membership — “a supreme example of the art of the deal,” as Donald Trump Jr. put it on Twitter.

In her 250th-anniversary toast, President Trump declared: “The experience of two and a half centuries has taught us that the greatest freedom may be the freedom of one person or family to rule forever, if that is what the people want. Nothing can stand in the way of the will of the people!”

A professor wrote a much-commented-on paper declaring the end of history. Liberal democracy was dead, the author contended. The internet and hyperconnectivity had turbocharged the deep-seated human craving for authority while empowering those who knew least to shout loudest.

Enlightened self-interest had always been an illusion. Self-interest was all there was. At least America had come to its senses in time to be in the vanguard of what the author called “the global digital despotic order of the 21st century.”